Teleconferencing, the ability to establish a telephone conference among a number of participants, has been employed as a way of conducting meetings for many years. For example, businesses use teleconferencing to meet with clients, project teams, and to deliver presentations between participants in different locations. The advantages of teleconferencing are reduction in travel costs, and increasing productivity of workers by eliminating the time to travel to a meeting.
In a teleconference, participants are connected through a conference bridge. A conference bridge maybe a server that links a plurality of telephone calls, allowing multiple people to be connected in the same call (conference call). In a typical teleconference, each conference is assigned an identifier (e.g. an ID number). The identifier is given to each participant. A host is assigned for the conference and the participants are connected when the host joins the conference. Parties can join the conference at any time by calling a designated phone number and providing the conference identifier.
Conference call management has progressed to the point where such calls are now efficient and productive. Such calls may be used for everything from technical development to corporate calls with Wall Street and everything in between. Corporate board meeting are often convened via teleconferencing calls. Call services such as Live Meeting® and others permit an administrator to control additional services such as voting, especially helpful in the board meeting context. Such systems typically require an internet connection to fully take advantage of the additional call services.
Existing teleconferencing technology have several drawbacks when used in more formal meetings where, for example, a vote is required to authorize some action, and there are participants joining by telephone or mobile devices. An example of a formal meeting may be a regular board meeting of an organization where resolutions are voted on. A disadvantage of present teleconferencing methods are that typically, when participants access the teleconference by telephone, voting usually requires a voice vote. When a voice vote is taken, there is no efficient way of establishing who is voting, and how they are voting without taking a roll call of the participants. Additionally, in some meetings a quorum of participants may be needed for the vote to be effective, and again a roll call of who is on the conference call at the time of the vote would be required to establish that there is a quorum for the vote.
With telecommunications becoming increasingly mobile, the additional features of conference call management have not been extended to the mobile telecommunications space. For example, there is no known method for soliciting and controlling voting from participants using mobile devices. In a typical teleconference, voting is conducted by voice vote. For example, the leader of the teleconference, chairman of the meeting will call for a vote on a stated matter. The vote will be communicated by a voice vote of each participant. In a situation where there are participants that are not entitled to vote it is difficult to ascertain whether a participant giving a voice vote is actually entitled to vote. Additionally, unless the vote is unanimous the only way to accurately account for the vote is by performing a roll call vote. This requires the chairman for the secretary to call out the name of each participant, and record their vote. This is inefficient when there are multiple matters to be voted on and a large number of participants. Thus, there is a need to develop a system and method to provide teleconference participants with an easy and secure way to vote. Additionally, because of the increased use of mobile devices for telecommunications, there is a need to develop a system and method to provide teleconference participants using mobile devices with an easy and secure way to vote.